Democrats' post-mortems after this election were already exhausting last Wednesday, and they've only continued for the last nine days. And on networks like CNN, they have had to hammer home the reasons why Dems lost so terribly, in terms of losing control of the House and Senate.

Of course, all of this slips into hyperbole very quickly, no matter how close the presidential election actually was.

Trump won the popular vote, yes, but his margins in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan were miniscule — at last count, 30,000 votes in Wisconsin, which is less than half the capacity of Levi's Stadium; 70,000 votes in PA, which is about Levi's capacity; and 80,000 votes in Michigan. It's kind of tragic when you imagine that the votes of just those 180,000 people could mean the difference between us having a catastrophic second Trump term with a kangaroo cabinet of dipshit loyalists and nutjobs, and having a sane or even possibly inspiring next four years. And it was just the whims of those 180,000 people that the entire news media is using to create the narrative of the country's rightward shift. (Along with a few House races.)

The balance of power in the Senate hinged on two seats and the resignation of Joe Manchin; the balance in the House is going to hinge on maybe five, same as it was, with the Democrats so far flipping almost as many seats as the Republicans did.

In other words, the story of the country's rightward shift is a bit overblown.

Still, polls show that even among Democrats, crime has become a central concern, and Republicans like Donald Trump, through force of repitition, have convinced a whole lot of voters that liberal policies and liberal cities are to blame, even while crime — especially violent crime — escalates in very Red places across the country, like Tennessee, Missouri, and Alabama.

Thus we have this latest CNN segment that aired Wednesday, in which Erin Burnett adopts the narrative that liberal cities across the country are shifting rightward, and it's all because of crime and a shift toward a law-and-order mentality.

And who does she bring on to talk about this, but newly elected Mayor-elect Daniel Lurie, with the clear aim to paint outgoing Mayor London Breed as somehow more liberal and soft on crime.

Lurie tries to portray himself as being about "common sense," saying "we don't think of ourselves as progressive, moderate, or conservative here in San Francisco," meaning, I guess, him and his team.

"We have to make sure that we have a fully staffed police department," Lurie says. "We have to get our behavioral health and drug crisis under control in our city... I don't believe that's a rightward swing. That's a common sense approach."

Clearly without knowing too much about San Francisco politics, Burnett plows into the interview with Lurie, calling Breed "one of the most prominent progressive Democrats in the country," and saying, "part of the reason [Breed] fell out of favor with voters … was, sure, rising crime, but slashing the police budget."

Burnett seems to believe the police budget has been slashed and that there is a "growing number of homeless tents" in San Francisco, though neither of those things is objectively true. Breed publicized a 60% drop in tents on the street last month, and as the Chronicle re-explains today, Breed actually diverted more funds toward the police department in recent years.

Breed's Dream Keeper initiative, when introduced in the wake of the George Floyd protests of 2020, was intended to divert some SFPD funding toward the city’s shrinking Black community, however that never actually occurred. And, the Chronicle notes, the SFPD's $822 million budget is about 30% higher than it was when Breed took office more than five years ago.

To boot: Breed was the only mayoral candidate endorsed by the San Francisco Police Officers Association. That's a detail that doesn't fit very conveniently into CNN's narrative of why Breed wasn't elected.

Not to mention the fact that this also was no landslide for Lurie. With about 19,000 ballots left to tally, Lurie only leads Breed in first-choice votes by less than 9,000. He's still winning out in the ranked-choice contest, however, by about 10 points. (Only about 14,000 fewer San Franciscans, 85,300 in total at the current count, cast first-choice votes for the progressive candidate Aaron Peskin, compared to Lurie's 99,000.)

So, as the media continues their self-flaggelation and Democrat flaggelation and essentially kowtows to the great and mighty Trump machine for the next month or two, let's just call it like it is with these numbers. Were there dissatisfied voters in many parts of the country? Yes. Is San Francisco suddenly shifting to the right along with New York and Chicago? Not quite.

Related: Moderates Flip SF Board of Supervisors’ Progressive Majority, But Breed Gets One More Chance to Tip the Scales

It’s the third car break-in suffered by CNN reporter Kyung Lah in the Bay Area, though the smash-and-grab her rental car endured Wednesday was just a smash, as there was nothing in the car to grab.

CNN national correspondent Kyung Lah recorded a segment last week at a San Francisco Richmond District Walgreens entitled “CNN witnesses 3 alleged thefts in 30 minutes while reporting on shoplifting.” And Lah has some firsthand experience with crime in the Bay Area, as her crew’s car was broken into at City Hall in March, and another one of her crew's rental cars suffered the same fate months later while recording a segment in Oakland.

Now make that three car break-ins for Kyung Lah and her CNN crew. KTVU reports that Lah’s rental car was broken into a third time in the Bay Area, according to tweets that Lah herself posted Wednesday.

“I’m [in] #Oakland, shooting a story about crime. Got broken into again— but this time our car was completely empty. We were across the street— this happened in seconds,” she tweeted Wednesday afternoon.

She’s obviously becoming experienced at this, and is now giving advice to counter the thieves’ tactics. “Even tho the car is empty, the thieves break in and lower the seat so they can steal anything in the trunk. Our trunk was empty,” she added. “If you come to San Francisco or Oakland, do not leave a single thing in your car.”

While national news crews may get more attention over their own break-ins, Bay Area visitors across the board are seeing their cars broken into. Lah notes a stunning pattern.  “At the rental car return lot, the employee tells us of the 250 cars returned yesterday, 27 had been broken into, just more than 10% of cars returned,” she said.

According to KTVU, Oakland has recorded nearly 6,500 automobile-related break-ins thus far in 2023, which represents a full 25% increase compared to this point last year.

Related: KPIX Reporter and Cameraman Robbed at Gunpoint at Twin Peaks [SFist]

Image: @KyungLahCNN via Twitter

It should come as no surprise that CNN's gratuitous San Francisco hit piece several weeks ago — a Sunday evening, hour-long special about how the city has gone to hell, in the vein of Fox News — didn't embrace any nuanced angles about the lives of homeless people.

Now that CNN's CEO of the last year, Chris Licht, is out the door, it is prescient to question what his goals were with the network, whose ratings were taking during his tenure. And taking on the sensational, national-favorite pastime of dumping on San Francisco when its chips are down for some Sunday evening ratings fits into the modus operandi of a CEO who also decided — unwisely — to give Donald Trump an open forum to spew his bullshit in a town hall special the week before.

The rightward turn of CNN in recent months has been well documented, and that "What Happened to San Francisco?" mini-documentary seemed to be part of that trend. Respected journalist Sara Sidner was likely overruled and/or wasn't even involved in the editing of the special, which hewed to TV news's worst tendencies to decontextualize and over-simplify complex issues.

Ironically, this was an episode of Anderson Cooper's "The Whole Story" series. It would hardly be possible to tell the whole story of SF's current web of challenges in an hour of TV cut through by 20 minutes of commercials.

Homelessness is one such challenge, as Mayor London Breed likes to call it. And the Chronicle's Soleil Ho reached out this week to one of the unhoused subjects interviewed by Sidner, disabled former firefighter Couper Orona — whom Sidner likely found via this mini-documentary about her and how she tends to fellow unhoused people's medical needs. Orona's story is a complicated one, and one that CNN apparently didn't have time for.

One brief exchange is included in CNN's special, in which Sidner presses Orona on why she won't accept housing in one of the city's many — and multiply troubled — SROs. Sidner says, "Take the housing, it’s safer!" and Orona replies, "No, it's not."

The further explanation, which Orona says she gave to Sidner on camera, never made it to air. But, as she tells Ho, "People die every second in [SROs] and they just scoop the body aside and let the next person in.” And she relayed a story about her sister living in one SRO where a man was repeatedly breaking into her unit, and her complaints went unaddressed. Thus, Orona prefers controlling her environment in an encampment, even if that arguably isn't a lot safer.

Orona further says that a friend of hers named Crystal in the same encampment, who was interviewed on camera for "almost an hour," ended up just as a 13-second bit standing in as a symbol for everyone who loses their housing because they miss their curfews. As Orona explains to Ho, Crystal was supposed to be signing in at certain times to keep her housing and her belongings, but she ended up with an infection that landed her in the hospital for two weeks. And the SRO kicked her out and gave her housing to someone else as a result.

While we, and the Chronicle, can't confirm the details of that case, or the one involving Orona's sister, it sounds pretty typical of an SRO system that was the subject of a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation by the Chronicle, detailing egregious and unsafe conditions. A subsequent piece detailed how easily — and how often — formerly homeless people who achieved the goal of being housed then lose that housing due to sometimes arbitrary rules.

And did we really need another piece detailing SF's social ills in as perfunctory and superficial a fashion as this CNN piece did, implying the sympathy for the homeless is misplaced, without offering any new insight, for the benefit of an audience far away that wants to tsk-tsk liberalism writ large?

"Yes, San Francisco has real issues, like any city that’s ever existed," Ho writes. "But we’d get further in solving them if we stop cutting the inconvenient facts out of frame."

True dat.

Related: A Huge Number of SF's Supportive Housing Units Are In Run-Down, Vermin-Infested SROs, and It's Barely Better Than Being Homeless

Top image: Still from "Couper Was Here," a documentary on Vimeo from Studio Intersect

CNN will continue its Fox News tilt this Sunday night with an hour-long special called ‘What Happened to San Francisco?’ a mini-documentary determined to push the “failed city” narrative.

It’s fair to wonder lately, “What Happened to CNN?” From their universally panned Trump town hall Wednesday night, to their inability to figure out what to do with the prime-time 6 p.m. PT slot after they were forced to fire the wildly unqualified but nepotistically connected Chris Cuomo, CNN lately seems, how would Don Lemon put it, “past their prime.” But in a little Sunday night ratings grab, KRON4 reports that CNN will be airing an hour-long SF-bashing mini-documentary called “What Happened to San Francisco?”

We cannot embed the trailer for this show, but you can watch it here. And it's hosted by Sara Sidner, an absolutely fearless and top-notch journalist. In the trailer, Sidner says “I love this city, I truly love this city and I still do. It’s just that it hurts to see what happened to it.” The screen then shifts to a montage of images of homelessness and drug use, and residents complaining the city has a “No-punishment kind of attitude.”

There are a few clips from underemployed people who’ve turned into Twitter's biggest anti-SF shit-stirrers, plus we have the infamous Walgreens shoplifter on a bike video, the Union Square smash-and-grab, and an off-screen voice wonders aloud, “Why are people feeling empowered that they can do this with impunity?”

According to the Chronicle, a press release for the special says San Francisco is “at the forefront of the nation’s homelessness, mental illness and drug addiction crises,” and adds that “some residents worry Northern California’s largest municipality could become a so-called failed city.”

Failed city?  San Francisco has a GDP of more than $600 billion, fourth-largest in the U.S. And I imagine CNN will not report that SF’s homelessness rate was trending downward last year, or that San Francisco ranks No. 14 for violent crime in the nation, well below some other major metros — and that violent crime is twice as frequent in cities like Houston and Dallas.

The Chronicle's Roland Li, who’s certainly had the term “doom loop” atop many of his articles, points out in the above tweet how San Francisco-bashing has always been a media cottage industry, even in the boomiest of boom times. The media has had a fascination with trashing San Francisco seemingly for decades. Yes, you are more likely to get your window broken in SF than, say, Houston, But you are far more likely to be murdered in Houston, so I’ll take my chances here by the Bay.

Related: It Will Always Be More Profitable/Clickable to Shit On San Francisco, So People Will Always Do It [SFist]

Image: Hardik Pandya via Unsplash

CNN’s Don Lemon and Brian Stelter both testified at the sentencing of a 36-year-old Bay Point man who threatened to kill CNN hosts, their parents, and their children over the network's lack of faith in Trump’s claims about the 2020 election results.

Back in January, in the weeks after the January 6 U.S. Capitol insurrection and the Biden inauguration that it failed to prevent, we brought you the news of a 36-year-old Bay Point man making death threats against Democrats in Congress and their families. That man was Robert Lemke, and it turns out his phone contacts (actually at least three burner phones and their contacts) had the direct numbers of several high-ranking people in Congress and the media.    

At the time, Lemke was accused of texting the brother of Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-Brooklyn) and saying, “Your brother is putting your entire family at risk with his lies and other words. We are armed and nearby your house. You had better have a word with him." But we now know he was similarly texting ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos, and CNN hosts Don Lemon and Briat Stelter. That’s because both Lemon and Stelter testified against Lemke at his sentencing, according to a Washington Post report reprinted on SFGate, and Lemke was sentenced to three years in prison.

Lemke’s M.O. was apparently to find incredibly detailed family information on Congressional Democrats and members of the media (he sent threats to 50 such people), and the engage in some “I’m right next door” or “I’m nearby” threats to get them to stop reporting the inconvenient fact that Trump had lost. One such message read, "We are nearby, armed and ready. Thousands of us are active/retired law enforcement, military, etc. That's how we do it."

(Another part of his M.O. was to claim he was a former Alameda County sheriff’s deputy, forcing that department to issue a correction clarifying that nope, nope, this guy was never, ever a deputy here.)

Brian Stelter wrote a personal essay about his experience with Lemke posted Monday to CNN. “The messages [from Lemke] invoked my family members — my brother, my mother, and my father,” Stelter said. “One of the voice messages said ‘you can either choose to dig the hole deeper or stop digging, because we're not fucking around.’ One of the texts included a photo of my father's grave site. Another text described my mother's house, implying he was there.”

Lemke was sentenced to not only three years in prison, but three years of supervision after release.

Related: Bay Area Man Arrested After He Allegedly Went Nuts Threatening Democratic Congressman and His Family on Jan. 6 [SFist]

Screenshot: CNN

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa revealed Wolf Blitzer today that he will not run for Governor. "The answer's no. I make that decision because like I've said many times, I love the city I was born and raised in, the city my grandpa came to 100 years ago," he told Blitzer.

"Cities are on the frontlines of the challenges facing us in terms of the economic crisis," he continued. "Here in the City of LA, 12.5% unemployment rate, 21,000 people have lost their home over the last 2 years, we're facing a unprecedented and historical budget deficit of $530 million dollars. I feel compelled to complete what I started out to do. I said to Los Angeles four years ago to dream with me. i said we would take on the many challenges that we face in the city: public school and public safety, the issue of the environment. I said that we would do everything we could to come together as a city. I can't leave this city in the middle of a crisis, that's as simple as that."

Today's news comes as a bit of a shock since in a recent LA Times poll, Villaraigosa landed 38% of those polled, with former Governor and current Attorney General Jerry Brown and San Francisco Mayor receiving 32% and 13%, respectively. And in SFist's casual poll, Villaraigosa garnered 19%, with Brown and Newsom taking in 50% and 31%, respectively.

Villaraigosa's departure from the race leaves ample room for Newsom or Brown to take Sacramento.

SFist asked Gavin Newsom for comment. We'll update when he responds.

Yesterday, David Hazinski attempted to harness the awesome power of the world wide web with this colonel of wisdom about the currant state of journalism. In his op-ed peace for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, he informs us that such journalistic mediums as CNN YouTube debates, political blogs, and cellphone videos are, in a word, crap. At least when it comes to giving and receiving accurate, Pulitzer-worthy information.

Granite, the only time we here at SFist concern ourselves with accuracy is if it involves us getting something for free, butt old man Hazinski has a point: "unfettered citizen journalism" really needs standards. Makes scents, right? Standards that, presumably, can only be created, administered, and understood within the holy temple of j-school. But if he's sew intent on maintaining the time-honored tradition of elbow patch-adorned sports jackets, hiding flask of whiskey in desk drawers, and spewing phrases like "excellence in journalism" or "hot scoop!" then why the does his article mimic any TLDR posting you might find on l'Internet? The exact shit he's freaking out about?

Take, for example, how Hazinski -- the head of broadcast gnus at the University of Georgia -- misspells "principles." Twice.

...Citizen reports can be a valuable addition to news and information flow with some protections. ...There are commonly accepted ethical principals — two source confirmation of controversial information or the balanced reporting of both sides of a story, for example, but adhering to the principals is voluntary...

Update: Sen. Barack Obama's campaign office in Rochester and John Edwards' offices have also been evacuated. Our sister site, Bostonist is live-blogging the situation right now. Apparently, a man wants to "speak to Hillary Clinton. He has two hostages (maybe more) and [allegedly has] a bomb strapped to his chest ... police have asked the media not to take live shots of the building." Yikes.

A little bit of breaking news well outside of the Bay Area jurisdiction: as of this morning, several people are still being held hostage at Hillary Clinton's campaign office in New Hampshire. According to CNN:

The affiliates said the incident began about 1 p.m. at the headquarters in Rochester. WMUR in New Hampshire said the hostage-taker was an armed man ... a witness, Lettie Tzizik, told the station she spoke to a woman shortly after she was released from the office by the hostage-taker, saying "[a] young woman with a 6-month or 8-month-old infant came rushing into the store just in tears, and she said, 'You need to call 911. A man has just walked into the Clinton office, opened his coat and showed us a bomb strapped to his chest with duct tape,'" the Web site reported."

Clinton was in the Washington area at the time of the incident.

More on this later. Now back to NorCal-y tidbits. (And perhaps this will stave off a day of Robert Morrow's ever-amusing "Hillary Is A Bull-Dyke" emails? We hope so.)

Also, although we doubt it will have the same OJ Simpson-Al Cowlings-White Bronco appeal, you can read more about it and watch it live here.